dont trust the home-brew extruder from IAP?

As I don't have my printer yet I can't compare yet., but it still seems really odd that the white PLA from IAP needs such high temps.

You should be able to print PLA well around and below the 200 mark. It is the higher temp which usually gives rise to stringing because then the retraction is less effective as the plastic continues to ooze out.

I'm fairly happy with mine so far... printing PLA at 200 (have tried the white that came and a green from amazon). Both have done well. Only issue is that in between prints, I sometimes need to take the filament out, cut it and put it back in (or sometimes I can get away with just pushing some through manually until it starts to come out (not a lot of force needed, just enough to get some out).

I noticed mine start to do that too. Ultimately the tube failed and got completely blocked up. It got to the point where it wouldn't pull back out and kept breaking off. Instead of redrilling and redrilling, I bought the E3D.

spiderdaddy,

I think he means when he finishes a print and goes to start a new one, nothing happens until he manually forces the filament through or cuts the end off. This is what mine did before it no longer worked and I needed a new tube.

I haven't been able to print very much with mine due to scheduling reasons, but the 5 or 6 models I have printed seem to be doing OK- no jams or anything. I've also been able to print with the heated bed at 60C and the extruder in the 190-200C range with the included IAP white PLA. I haven't tried ABS yet as it only came in recently, but so far I don't see why such high temperatures are necessary.

If I had to guess, we all have some pretty major calibration differences on our thermistors- we're probably all using the same *actual* temp, but the difference in reported temps mean that it's probably a calibration thing. This isn't TOO bad of a problem since it sort of doesn't matter what the actual temperature is since we can calibrate it, other than needing to have two "target temperatures" for two different extruders using the same roll of plastic (for dual extruder setups).